I wished I could make everything all better for my little sister, but I couldn’t. Maybe I could at least take her mind off of things for a little while by telling her a nice story. So I grabbed my doll Julie off from my pillow (I didn’t want Julie to get jealous or upset with me for not paying enough attention to her) and went to Caroline’s bed, wrapped my arms around her and began spinning a wonderful tale about a little girl who ended up in a beautiful world made of all sorts of candy. I had written a story like it during our free reading and writing time about a month ago. So far it was my favorite out of all the stories I had written.
“And there she stayed and lived happily ever after,” I felt her breathing on my bare arm become more steady and her body go limp. I laid her head on her pillow (boy, she was pretty heavy!) and pulled her covers up over her shoulders.
I decided to leave Lucky lying above the blankets at her feet. He was only a small dog anyways. I didn't know why he wasn't allowed on the furniture. It wasn't like our furniture was all that great. Most of it was really old and worn out, and Lucky was a part of our family. At least I thought so. I loved him and I know he loved us too. He seemed to feel our sadness, worry, get excited to see us, and anything else that a loving member of a family should do. Of course, that was how I had felt about Whisper too. I was pretty sure now that Dad hadn't felt the same way.
I’m Julie. I’m more than just Emily’s doll or the voice in her head that she doesn’t even recognize. I’m a part of her. I’ve seen things, things that Emily doesn’t even realize have happened or do happen. Her problem is that she lets her emotions get in the way too much. I don’t have that problem. I still can’t believe that heartless bastard killed their horse. I knew he was no good. I didn’t realize just how rotten he could be, I guess. The horse is in a better place now at least, anywhere is probably better than here with that man in charge. Someday I’ll get my turn to take care of things. Then everything will be different.
CHAPTER two
I felt kind of responsible for Caroline since I was her older sister and all. The problem was that I was still only a girl myself and no match for the evil human being that we were unlucky enough to be born to. I was satisfied and relieved that I was able to set her mind free from this place, from being a member of the Fleischer family, if only for a short while. Caroline was still dressed in her clothes from the day and the dog was where he didn't belong but, if there really was a God, no one would be coming into our room tonight to know the difference.
She looked so peaceful lying there. Her beautiful long, thick brown hair sprawled out around her head, covering the pillow. She always cried as it was being brushed. My mother always threatened to cut it off, but my father wouldn't allow that. So Caroline practiced brushing her own hair every day, probably hoping that she would be able to do it on her own soon.
She took more after Mom with her looks and was a bit on the chubby side. My parents both said it was just her baby fat and she would slim down as she grew older. I wondered about that. I had always been skinny.
Either way, Caroline was still beautiful. She was only eight years old, a whole three years younger than me, and that alone made the things that our father did so much worse for her. She was more emotional than I was too; probably because she was still so young.
She would learn in time to hide her feelings, at least from Dad. I was still working on learning that lesson myself. The best I could do to protect her was to help teach her when it was wise to stay quiet and out of the way (which was most of the time).
I always worried about my brothers and my sister. All the time. How could I care so much about them, yet our parents seem to care so little? How could my father do such horrible things and still tell himself that he loved us? Did he even tell himself that he loved us? He acted like he hated every single one of us. I didn't know for sure if he did the same kind of horrible nasty things to the boys as he did to us girls because we never talked about it. But there were many small clues that he had, besides the fact that all of us avoided spending any time alone with him.
My older brother Johnny was fourteen. I hoped and prayed that when he got big enough one day he would save all of us. He was bigger than Mom already and almost as big as Dad, but not quite. And not as strong yet either. He was skinny too, like me, but not puny. You could tell he had muscles from working on our farm just by looking at him.
Over this past year his voice had changed from a little boy's voice to more of a man's voice. His looks had changed too, losing that little boy quality. Now his nose appeared narrower and his chin more defined, along with his Adam's apple. At least that's what my mother had called it. Like God had taken a chisel and chipped away at my older brother until all the little boy that was left of him was gone. He had dark hair, almost black, with just a little blonde patch at his part in the front. That, along with his bright blue eyes, would make him quite the heart breaker Mom had said. Just like our father, that's what she said.
I had to admit that Johnny did take after Dad with his looks, but his personality made him appear completely different than our father did to me. I thought Johnny was actually pretty handsome. But I was a little confused about the heart breaker bit. Why did he have to break hearts at all? Maybe he would find the one girl that was right for him and nobody's heart would have to get broken. Maybe he didn’t even want a girl at all ever and that would be fine too.
Johnny was stubborn and I knew the beatings Dad gave him were hard on him. He barely complained and only cried when he thought he was alone and no one could hear him. But sometimes I did.
He didn't play anymore like the rest of us still liked to when we got the chance. That had changed over this past year also. Johnny seemed to enjoy being alone. Mostly fishing.
Maybe our big brother was making plans to save us. Or (and I hoped I was wrong about this one), maybe instead of saving us, Johnny was making plans to leave us behind. Sometimes that voice in my head tried to tell me that. I refused to believe it. Johnny and I used to be so close, being the oldest of the kids. I still liked to think that we were, just we were both getting older.
Eric was my younger brother, seven years old. He was a trouble maker, loud and always busy, busy, busy. And he was a little slow, like with his talking and his thinking. We had to explain everything to Eric, often two or three times. I sometimes got frustrated with my little brother, but I loved him. His childishness was so adorable and I just felt like hiding him from the world and all of its pain.
Eric was pudgier too, like Caroline and my mother. It was cute on him. He had freckles and his front teeth looked too big for his mouth. His hair was thin like mine and he was a red head.
I wondered how we all ended up looking so different but also so much alike. I thought it was funny how that all worked. Mom told us that it was because Dad had black hair and she had blonde. Sometimes you ended up with a little of everything in between.
Mom wasn't much help at all where Dad was concerned. I think she was just as afraid of Dad and seemed just as stuck in the nightmare as we were. Most of the time lately I think she was just too drunk to care anyways.
Mom was a lot smaller than Dad was, not skinny-wise (he told her all the time how fat she was and ugly too, but I didn't think so), but height-wise. She was only a little taller than me now. When we both stood face to face my eyes were even with her nose. I didn't think she was beautiful, but she definitely wasn't ugly either. My mother was just ordinary. I thought ordinary was good. It seemed to be less noticeable.
I often wondered if other people could see how sad she was just by looking at her. I thought I could. Sometimes I would look at her and swear the skin on her face was drooping. It probably was from being so sad all the time. I would be sad if I was stuck married to such a miserable man. And I didn't think she even knew yet how truly horrible he really was to us kids.
She told me once that Dad had a rough childhood full of hurt and he swore he would never be the weak little boy that he once was again. Maybe he
told himself that he was teaching us to be tough. I tried not to hate him, I really did. But there was nothing nice to say about him. There was nothing nice that I could ever think of to say anyhow.
Mom talked to me sometimes about things, but not very often. I treasured the time that we spent together like that. I especially enjoyed it when she wasn't drinking. I just had to be careful to listen to what she had to say and not ask too many of my own questions because sometimes that made her stop talking right away.
Most of the time my mother was teaching me a new chore when she talked to me. I couldn't think of any chores I still had left to learn though. So our talks were a lot less often and would probably slowly come to a stop in the years to come. That realization made me a little sad.
The first thing I could clearly remember being taught by my mother was how and what to dust. And that you should dust before doing any of the other cleaning chores in the same room, otherwise all of the cleaning that had been done before the dusting would have to be done again. Mom had said, “To explain what I mean: you wouldn’t want to dust the coffee table and then sweep the cobwebs from the ceiling. Then you would just end up with a bunch of dust and cobwebs on the coffee table and have to dust that all over again.” She had also talked to me about the day I was born during that lesson.
She told me as we dusted the nick-knacks about how her water had broken just before noon on a dreary, drizzly Saturday morning, the 18th of July in 1964. She had been outside getting vegetables from the garden to go along with that night's dinner. The contractions came on hard and strong after that and she made her way slowly to the barn where she knew my father was piling hay. She and my father were both worried that they would never make it to the hospital in time. They didn't even make it into the house. She gave birth to me right there in the barn. She told me how they both fell in love with me the minute they saw me. I loved that story and liked to think maybe at that point my father wasn’t such a bad man. It was by far one of the best memories I had of any of my mother's talks with me.
There were more talks on different subjects throughout the years as I learned how to wash dishes from start to finish, how to wash laundry, by hand when necessary and in the machine, and also how to hang it out to dry.
While teaching me to hang clothes on the line she told me a story that her mother used to tell her. If nightfall came and the clothes were still left hanging out on the line, my grandmother had told my mother that restless spirits would be able to put the clothes on and wear them themselves. Then they would be free to roam the earth as any living person would for the entire night. She told my mom that sometimes the spirits didn’t even bother hanging the clothes back up, just left them lying on the ground. Also, the clothes that were worn by the restless spirits were always more stiff than the rest, because some of the ‘dead’ had stayed in them.
My mother told me that she never really believed the story, but thought that it was just an imaginative way to get her to remember not to leave the clothes out on the line too long. I never planned to leave the clothes out on the line long enough to find out for myself.
Then she had taught me how to iron, what to iron, what to hang and what and how to fold. From what I could tell, everything got ironed and most things got hung, except pajamas and underwear, which got folded neatly after being ironed. I didn’t really understand the point of ironing the underwear, but I would do as I was taught.
She told me stories as she gradually taught me all the basics of cooking. Mom always told me during my cooking lessons that as long as I knew the basics, the only thing left was to have a good recipe to follow. She also taught me that being able to cook was the key to finding a good man and that good food was the key to a happy family. I thought she must have had blinders to her own husband and family on if she thought that was true. I found that I was actually pretty darn good at cooking though and I really enjoyed it.
There were other chores and more stories and talks, like gathering the fresh fruits and vegetables from outside, making the beds, mending clothing, sewing new clothing, and so on. I enjoyed all of it.
I didn't know if we had any other living family. Like grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, or anything else. We pretty much kept to ourselves. I did know that my father's parents had both died in a tragic accident when he was only seventeen years old. That's how we ended up with our house and the land that it was on. Dad had inherited it when his parents passed away. But that was all that I knew. I didn't know what the tragic accident was, how old my grandparents were at the time, or anything else.
Sometimes I dreamed of what my grandparents would have been like or what it would be like to play Hide and Seek with a bunch of cousins. I also dreamed of having a rich aunt that adored me and spoiled me that decided to take me away on a fantastic adventure with her. But, besides my mother telling me little stories here and there about her own childhood, our parents always skirted the issue of other family and we had none that I knew of. So there were never any big family gatherings where we brought a salad or baked beans to pass around like there were in some of the books that I read.
No one ever came to visit us either, except for the people that stopped by the produce stand in our front lawn to buy food from us. Sometimes Dad took one or two of us kids with him when he went into town to buy stuff that we needed. But Dad had always taught us that kids are supposed to be “seen and not heard”, so none of us ever really got a chance to get to know anybody.
We didn't go to school either like a lot of other kids did. We were home-schooled. That's what Mom and Dad called it. We sure did learn a lot of things at home. A little bit of brain work each day and a whole lot of chores around the house and farm. That counted as school for us.
Occasionally, we worked on some math, spelling, reading, geography, history, and science. Mostly we learned stuff that was related to living life, paying bills, keeping house and farming. The boys did chores like mowing the lawn, cleaning the barn and fenced animal areas, feeding the animals, milking the cows, helping with butchering and cleaning dinner, plowing and planting the fields for crops, fishing, burning the garbage that was able to be burned, and so on.
Caroline and I helped with everything around the house and a little of the outside stuff also. We gathered eggs, groomed the animals, sometimes helped when it was time to plant the crops, gathered fresh vegetables and fruit from the field for our meals, and picked berries when they were ripe. We helped prepare and cook meals, washed dishes, did laundry, dusted and cleaned around the house, mended clothing, sewed, and anything else that was considered woman’s work. I did more than Caroline, of course, because I was older.
Mom had told me too that the State considered all of these little chores that we did to be some sort of school work. We got school credit for everything that we learned and everything that we did. Mom also said that someone from the State could come to check up on us at any time to make sure that we could really do everything that she wrote down.
We already took two written tests a year for the State, but those tests were only on Math, Science, English, and Social Studies. According to Mom, the State said that I was reading and writing at a high school level, which she seemed very proud of. She said I was great in the other things she taught me as well and we would be fine if the State ever did come to double check on things.
I wondered how many other kids got home-schooled like us. I thought about that and decided that if other kids were taught at home it must be because their parents had something they wanted kept hidden just like my father did. What other reason would someone have not to send their children to regular school?
Then I wondered if even some of the kids in the big schools got Sex Education too, the way that we did first hand from our father. I knew that there was such a thing as Sex Education, because Johnny had a textbook he had to do work from on the subject. Just thinking or reading about the word “sex” made me nervous and want to hide under my covers. I sure would like to think that not all kids had
to feel that way.
Our parents said that we didn't need or want anyone else in our lives. They said that we were all that each other would ever need. I hoped and prayed almost every day for more.
I lifted Julie off Caroline's bed with care, as if she were a real baby. She was about a foot and a half long and her skin was made of rubber, except for the eyes. Those were made of plastic. Her eyelids closed and opened, depending on how she was positioned. I had written the name I gave her on her buttocks in ink so that it wouldn't wear off easily. Her hair was a little curly and light brown like mine was and her eyes were brown.
I really did love my doll, but I was afraid of her as well. There seemed to be something hiding behind her eyes, something that reminded me too much of a real person with real feelings.
Sometimes I actually even believed that maybe Julie was the other voice that I sometimes heard in my head, but I knew that was just my active imagination. I called the other voice Julie anyways, just because it seemed to fit.
Detached: Book 1 of the Fleischer Series Page 2